Written by Craig D. Robins, Esq.The Obama Administration’s effort to assist struggling homeowners save their homes had been widely criticized. See my post: Problems with HAMP — Too Many to Count?
Treasury Department statistics released this week show that although HAMP has helped a number of American homeowners save their homes by enabling them to permanently modify their mortgages, the number has been substantially less than the administration had hoped for.
To date, the HAMP program has helped 691,000 homeowners. This is a major disappointment from the projected goal of helping close to four million Americans with mortgage troubles. The HAMP program is almost two and a half years old.
What is very upsetting is that more than 891,000 of those who signed up for HAMP have had their modifications canceled.
One of the reasons the program has not worked as planned is because the troubled mortgage industry had great difficulty adopting procedures to adequately process the HAMP applications, leading to a great amount of frustration suffered by hapless homeowners.
I previously posted a detailed article about the difficulties homeowners in HAMP were facing. WARNING: HAMP Can Drive Homeowners Into Bankruptcy .
New York University law professor Neil Barofsky, who released testimony that he prepared for a Congressional hearing this past week, said “Treasury rushed HAMP out the door in a manner best described as ‘ready, fire, aim,’ leading to mistakes that are still ricocheting today.”